Technically…

Given how many smart people end up working in investment management, I am always surprised how siloed we can be. You tend to be a fundamental guy, OR a quant gal, OR a technician. Never all three. In my view there ought to be more interdisciplinary investment strategies. One reason there aren’t more of them is that capital allocators have a hard time underwriting strategies that don’t fit neatly into pre-established boxes (a subject for another post).

Personally, I don’t believe our world breaks down into neat little boxes, so I am interested in opportunities to integrate analytical techniques from different disciplines. To that end I have been studying up on how you might marry fundamental and technical analysis in a disciplined way. Typically a vast chasm of prejudice separates the two camps.

Fundamental Analyst:“Intrinsic value is what matters. Market price fluctuations are just noise to be ignored. Analyzing charts is like tossing chicken bones and reading the entrails of livestock to see the future. It is like trading based on ancient superstition.”

Technician:“Market prices are what matter. Market prices reflect supply and demand dynamics, as well as investor psychology. Prices are real and tangible, unlike some academic’s estimate of intrinsic value, which depends on “squishy” estimates of growth rates and discount rates.”

What we have here are two people talking across each other. It is like two people arguing over whether hammers or screwdrivers are “better” tools. In reality hammers and screwdrivers are different tools with different use cases.

I don’t believe technical analysis is particularly useful over long time horizons. There is plenty of evidence that in the long run, stock prices track earnings and dividend growth. I also don’t believe fundamental analysis is particularly useful over short time periods. If you are placing a trade, it is supply and demand that impact your execution, not market price relative to intrinsic value.

Fundamental analysis is going to give you a better idea of whether a business will be a good investment for the next decade. Technical analysis is going to give you a better idea of why today’s price is moving up or down.

Now, I should be up front about the fact that I am not at all interested in chart patterns. I have no interest in scouring candlestick charts for head-and-shoulders or cups-and-handles or van-gogh’s-remaining-ear. As far as I’m concerned that really is like tossing chicken bones or reading animal entrails. I prefer to use simple technical indicators to get a sense of price momentum and investor psychology.

For the time being at least I have focused on three indicators:

Support/Resistance Lines: You can draw a support line across the lows on a chart and a resistance line across the highs. In my view (I certainly don’t claim to be an authority on technical analysis), these lines are rough indications of where valuation sensitive investors have acted to counter a stock’s momentum. The support line forms where valuation sensitive investors step in to buy the stock. The resistance line forms where they sell the stock.

Moving Averages: Moving averages quantify short-term price trends versus long-term price trends and are useful for visualizing momentum. It is generally a bullish sign when a shorter-term moving average crosses above a longer-term moving average and a bearish sign when a shorter-term moving average crosses below a longer-term moving average.

Money Flow Index: The money flow index is an indicator tracking volume-weighted price momentum. It is an oscillator that moves between a range of values. It is useful for understanding whether price momentum is overextended in either direction, and whether it might soon reverse. More on the calculation and interpretation of money flow index here.

I think of the support/resistance lines as marking out the upper and lower bounds for the market’s estimate of a stock’s intrinsic value. Fundamental investors enforce these boundaries by trading contra-momentum (they sell when they believe a stock is overvalued and buy when they believe a stock is undervalued). Inside those boundaries, a stock will tend to ping-pong back and forth until the fundamentals change unexpectedly or fundamental investors significantly alter their expectations. A variation on the latter is when the type of investor dominating a stock’s investor base transitions from value to growth investors or vice versa.

Thus, I would argue, if you are an investor with a high degree of confidence in your estimate of a stock’s intrinsic value, and that estimate differs significantly from market expectations, you may be able to profitably trade around momentum-driven price swings–the goal being to generate higher position-level IRRs than you would earn by simply buying and holding.

In a follow on post I will walk through a live case study from my own portfolio to make this more concrete.